I’d like to give an updated version of my thinking about the Night of Godric’s Hollow:
1) The official story requires Avada Kedavra to behave in very funny ways against a love shield (a normally invisible kill turning a body into a burnt crisp.) Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the only way it can be known to be true is if someone cast prior incantum on Voldemort’s wand. Which seems unlikely, because Bellatrix snatched it (See Ch. 53).
2) This indicates the good guys are lying or deceived. Possible reasons
a) Godric’s Hollow was a trap laid by the good guys, who don’t want to reveal their methods, so they made up a story about how it happened to fool the Death Eaters. Unlikely, because if they had, they probably would have prevented Bellatrix from getting Voldemort’s wand.
b) Voldemort faked his death. The good guys showed up, noticed they were confused, and figured Voldemort had just executed some inscrutable plot. They make up a story to prevent a panic.
c) Voldemort faked his death. Bellatrix switched a look-alike wand that had, recently, only been used to cast Avada Kedavra, fooling the good guys.
“Voldemort faked his death” is also supported by what we know of his intelligence.
The question is why did Voldemort fake his death? Everything we know about Eliezer’s philosophy in this story suggests Voldemort should not have tried a plot that was more complicated than necessary. And it doesn’t seem like this plot is necessary. The evidence we have indicates Voldemort was winning the war. So thus far, no theory I’ve seen for why he would do that looks convincing.
But perhaps, contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, Voldemort realized he would not win the war if he kept fighting it in a straightforward manner?
Assume for a moment that Quirelll was being honest with Hermione, in a twisted way. He was the hero and he invented Voldemort in order to defeat Voldemort. He then realized that being a hero wasn’t working out for him, so he went away, but unlike his Riddle persona, Voldemort would continue to be hunted, so he had to fake his death.
Just back from reading the new chapter, and assumed it without a second thought when I read that scene.
[Editing rest of comment to put it in rot13, because I don’t want to spoil chapter 84 for anyone who hasn’t read it. May be unnecessary, but I’m erring on the side of caution.]
Nyfb nffhzvat gung Gbz Evqqyr vf jub Nzryvn Obarf fhfcrpgf Dhveeryy gb or. Nyfb nffhzvat gung Gbz Evqqyr vf jub Nzryvn Obarf fhfcrpgf Dhveeryy gb or. Ohg nppbeqvat gb Obarf, Evqqyr qvfnccrnerq va 1973, jurernf gur Avtug bs Tbqevp’f Ubyybj jnf va 1981. Gung fhttrfgf gung “V… jrag bss gb qb fbzrguvat ryfr V sbhaq zber cyrnfnag” ersref gb gnxvat hc gur Qnex Ybeq tvt va rnearfg.
Bu Tbq. V whfg unq n greevslvat gubhtug. Jung vs ur qvfcbfrq bs gur Ibyqrzbeg crefban sbe ab bgure ernfba guna gung vg fgbccrq orvat sha?
Also assuming that Tom Riddle is who Amelia Bones suspects Quirrell to be.
Extremely unlikely. Dumbledore, Snape, McGonagall and Moody at a minimum know that Riddle = Voldemort; there would be no reason not to inform Amelia of this. Also, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore always knew Riddle = Voldemort- he wouldn’t be foolish enough to use his real name for his hero persona.
2b seems unlikely given Harry’s memory of the night matching the official line. Did Dumbledore do a FMC on baby Harry?
Also, remember that for someone with Horcruxes, one can de facto fake one’s own death by actually dying and waiting for the resurrection. There’s no particular need to assume that he survived that night in the traditional sense of the word.
But Harry’s memory didn’t include Voldemort casting Avada Kedavra on Harry. That memory is neutral WRT the “rebounded Avada Kedavra” hypothesis.
Also, no part of a rebuttal to your comment, but re-reading the scene, what’s with this line?:
And the boy in the crib saw it, the eyes, those two crimson eyes, seeming to glow bright red, to blaze like miniature suns, filling Harry’s whole vision as they locked to his own -
In canon? In MoR eye-contact has happened a bunch of times since Harry got good enough to detect Legilimency, it’s just been the usual dramatic device.
Didn’t Moaning Myrtle recount something similar about her own death in canon, in which the glowing eyes were the Basilisk’s?
It’d be funny if the rock Dumbledore gives Harry were actually a piece of petrified:
a) James (and Dumbledore knows)
b) Voldemort (and he doesn’t)
c) Harry himself (and the scenario for that would be ridiculous).
A FMC is described as completely envisioned and controlled by the caster, putting as much time into it as the memory covers; so Dumbledore in FMCing a baby Harry is choosing every detail of the scene. Given that… why would Dumbledore direct a scene like Harry recollects? It has several oddities which reduce its value as a ‘you killed my parents! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!’ memory.
That’s the one. It certainly came from somewhere—IIRC, it’s got details he wasn’t told that have been confirmed, which means that it’s not an internally-generated false memory. So either it’s real, or it’s been implanted by someone familiar with the tale.
Perhaps one of the at-least-two people who downvoted me would like to tell me what these details are that make it impossible for the memory to have been internally generated.
So far, all I can come up with is this: on the basis of Voldemort’s mild reluctance to kill his mother in this memory, Harry deduced (via a rather tenuous chain of reasoning) that Dumbledore told Snape about the prophecy, and when he confronted McGonagall with this she behaved in a manner consistent with what he deduced. This doesn’t seem all that conclusive to me. What am I missing?
In fact, I’m pretty sure that events did not happen as Harry deduced them. In canon, Snape overheard the prophecy being given. This seems to match up with what Snape says in the chapter formerly known as 77:
I thought I had merely happened to overhear it, when in truth it was I who was overheard.
Therefore I suggest that Dumbledore did not tell Snape about the prophecy. I’m not sure why or how McGonagall knows: possibly, in a departure from canon, she was conducting Trelawney’s interview instead of Dumbledore himself.
The beginning of Harry’s line of reasoning is that Voldemort was not terribly eager to kill Lily Potter. This seems likely to be true, but is also not indicative of anything. It’s a mildly strange thing to imagine, but we imagine strange things all the time.
Quirrell suggests that Harry can see Thestrals due to his memory of that night, which would suggest that it’s a true memory. But Harry seems to think that he saw the Thestrals because he has realized that Dementors are death, so that he has “seen death and comprehended it” in a more literal sense.
I’m not sure why or how McGonagall knows: possibly, in a departure from canon, she was conducting Trelawneys’ interview instead of Dumbledore himself.
Yep:
The old wizard’s face turned grave. “The same reason it must be kept secret, Minerva. The same reason I told you to come to me, if Harry made any such claim. Because it is a power that Voldemort knows not.”
The words took a few seconds to sink in.
And then the cold shiver went down her spine, as it always did when she remembered.
It had started out as an ordinary job interview, Sybill Trelawney applying for the position of Professor of Divination.
[Snip prophecy]
Those dreadful words, spoken in that terrible booming voice, didn’t seem to fit something like partial Transfiguration.
“Perhaps not, then,” Dumbledore said after Minerva tried to explain. [...]
Your suggestions are based on a faulty premise. Even in canon, Avada Kedavra has varying effects. Usually it causes an instant, silent death. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, it blows Dumbledore’s body over a railing and off the tower. In Godric’s Hollow, the rebounded Killing Curse exploded the upstairs of a house, and we never actually hear what happened to Voldemort’s body.
I don’t think we’re necessarily meant to suspect something amiss here; I think Eliezer just filled in a blank that was left open in the novels.
And I also don’t necessarily think a “love shield” is what’s involved in this story. In canon, Lily’s nonviolent sacrifice is what protected Harry. Eliezer presumably doesn’t believe that attempting to defend yourself makes your sacrifice any less noble, so it’s probably something different here. I think the likely story in MoR is that when Voldemort sarcastically said “I accept the bargain, yourself to die and the child to live”, he accidentally created a magically binding oath.
“The Dark Lord came to Godric’s Hollow,” said McGonagall in a whisper. “You should have been hidden, but you were betrayed. The Dark Lord killed James, and he killed Lily, and he came in the end to you, to your crib. He cast the Killing Curse at you. And that was where it ended. The Killing Curse is formed of pure hate, and strikes directly at the soul, severing it from the body. It cannot be blocked. The only defense is not to be there. But you survived. You are the only person ever to survive. The Killing Curse reflected and rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar on your forehead. That was the end of the terror, and we were free. That, Harry Potter, is why people want to see the scar on your forehead, and why they want to shake your hand.”
The storm of weeping that had washed through Harry had used up all his tears; he could not cry again, he was done.
(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)
I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the “but how does anyone know that’s what happened?” problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.
Yes, but we saw the actual event in Humanism, part 1. We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse. The “small, small note of confusion” refers to what Harry realized much later: “Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children.” The confusion was about the reason Voldemort was so intent on killing Harry in the first place.
The reference to souls is simply because that’s what Dumbledore believes, not because of any plot. Yes, the Killing Curse behaved bizarrely, but we’re supposed to think “Why did it behave bizarrely?”, not “That must be a lie!”, especially given that it sometimes behaved bizarrely in canon.
If “Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story” and we don’t know what it is, that means he lied to us in Chapter 43.
Thank you for quoting the bit in chapter 46. I had forgotten it, and it is worth taking into account. But in context, I don’t think it shows what you think it does:
Lord Voldemort had killed James Potter. He had preferred to spare Lily Potter’s life. He had continued his attack, therefore, with the sole purpose of killing their infant child.
Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children.
So prior to recovering that memory, Harry didn’t have nearly as much reason to think Voldemort had been afraid of him. In Ch. 3, for all Harry knew Voldemort was just the sort of person who would murder his enemies’ children given the opportunity, and he would have been largely correct to think that.
But it seems Harry’s inference that Voldemort meant to kill him may not be as safe as Harry assumes. It is equally consistent with everything Harry notices to think that Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry. Consider this part:
“I give you this rare chance to flee,” said the shrill voice. “But I will not trouble myself to subdue you, and your death here will not save your child. Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all!”
“Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead!”
The empty thing that was Harry wondered if Lily Potter seriously imagined that Lord Voldemort would say yes, kill her, and then depart leaving her son unharmed.
“Very well,” said the voice of death, now sounding coldly amused, “I accept the bargain. Yourself to die, and the child to live. Now drop your wand so that I can murder you.”
Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, “your death here will not save your child” would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, “Yourself to die, and the child to live” also reflects Voldemort’s true intentions.
At this point, it looks to me very much like Voldemort somehow decided killing baby Harry was not the right response to the prophecy. The prophecy looks like a key clue here; probably Voldemort wouldn’t have bothered with such a complicated plot as he appears to be pursuing without the prophecy. But what thought process led to that plot?
Chris Hallquist wrote:
“Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, “your death here will not save your child” would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, “Yourself to die, and the child to live” also reflects Voldemort’s true intentions.”
That makes sense. Maybe all he wanted was to turn Harry into a horcrux, and suceeded.
Since creating horcruxes requires killing someone, killing James Potter was a convenient horcrux-energy source, while killing Lily could be an extra, but unnecessary bonus.
We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse
You’re misremembering the chapter, that scene ends like this:
And the boy in the crib saw it, the eyes, those two crimson eyes, seeming to glow bright red, to blaze like miniature suns, filling Harry’s whole vision as they locked to his own -
“Held the Idiot Ball” does not mean “made a large mistake”. It means “behaved implausibly stupidly so as to cheaply advance the plot”. If Voldemort could never make significant mistakes then Harry could never defeat him.
I agree with you about what “Held the Idiot Ball” means.
I evidently disagree with you about how implausibly stupid it is for Voldemort to accidentally, for no apparent reason, magically bind himself to the infant Harry in the middle of a fight.
Or do you imagine this to be a thing that happens a lot when wizards fight, such that it happening in this case is plausible?
I don’t think it happens a lot, because I don’t think such ironic offers are made very often. The reason for Voldemort to say what he said was to be prideful and cruel, to make Lily feel how futile her sacrifice would be. In the heat of the moment, in his cruelty, he might not have thought of the magical significance of verbally accepting such a bargain. If indeed this theory is correct, his first fall was a result of his hubris, which fits his character well; and it also fits his character well for him to have learned from it and to not make the same mistake again in the future.
I’m not married to this theory. I’d put it at maybe 50% or 55% confidence? But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I’ve seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I’ve seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
Still… one of the very first lessons of Quirrel was about pretending to lose when that gained you more than fighting would.
Granted that Voldemort back then was seen to be winning. But he was winning a war we still don’t know his motivations for starting in the first place...
because no explanation I’ve seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
True, no explanation offered so far explains it convincingly, but I don’t see the idea that an Avada Kedavra bounced off a baby holding any water either.
2d) Something Voldemort didn’t expect. If Slytherin’s Monster transferred it’s secrets with a Dark Ritual, Salazar could have planned for Rule 12 and plotted to transfer secrets to future heirs. How would you identify a baby as a parselmouth?
Why would (how would) the Basilisk transfer its secrets with a Dark Ritual rather than just, you know, talking?
Efficiency: speed & certainty. How many secrets would you be leaving behind before this incredibly baroque scheme was worth putting in place? How long would it take to communicate hundreds of ultra-advanced spells by one of the pre-eminent wizards of that golden age? How long can a student afford to be sneaking off to the Chamber?
We’ve seen legilimency used to read minds, but Order of the Phoenix also showed that it could be used to write to minds as well.
This seems to defeat the purpose somewhat. Isn’t the point of the Basilisk to ensure that only Parselmouths can access the secrets? Presumably legilimency is, if not impossible, at least difficult to use on a creature with the Gaze of Death, but if there were rituals to transfer information from its mind to yours, obtaining consent under duress seems a small enough obstacle.
Because a Dark Ritual could force a sacrifice that adds redundancy. Leave the Basilisk alone, mostly satisfied.
Kill it and you are bound to transfer the knowledge to the next heir.
Attempt to kill the heir and end up as a horcrux.
Again, Harry wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin when Voldemort was plotting to kill him, or attempting to kill him, or even afterwards. He was only ever a Horcrux of the Heir of Slytherin.
I’d like to give an updated version of my thinking about the Night of Godric’s Hollow:
1) The official story requires Avada Kedavra to behave in very funny ways against a love shield (a normally invisible kill turning a body into a burnt crisp.) Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the only way it can be known to be true is if someone cast prior incantum on Voldemort’s wand. Which seems unlikely, because Bellatrix snatched it (See Ch. 53).
2) This indicates the good guys are lying or deceived. Possible reasons
a) Godric’s Hollow was a trap laid by the good guys, who don’t want to reveal their methods, so they made up a story about how it happened to fool the Death Eaters. Unlikely, because if they had, they probably would have prevented Bellatrix from getting Voldemort’s wand.
b) Voldemort faked his death. The good guys showed up, noticed they were confused, and figured Voldemort had just executed some inscrutable plot. They make up a story to prevent a panic.
c) Voldemort faked his death. Bellatrix switched a look-alike wand that had, recently, only been used to cast Avada Kedavra, fooling the good guys.
“Voldemort faked his death” is also supported by what we know of his intelligence.
The question is why did Voldemort fake his death? Everything we know about Eliezer’s philosophy in this story suggests Voldemort should not have tried a plot that was more complicated than necessary. And it doesn’t seem like this plot is necessary. The evidence we have indicates Voldemort was winning the war. So thus far, no theory I’ve seen for why he would do that looks convincing.
But perhaps, contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, Voldemort realized he would not win the war if he kept fighting it in a straightforward manner?
Assume for a moment that Quirelll was being honest with Hermione, in a twisted way. He was the hero and he invented Voldemort in order to defeat Voldemort. He then realized that being a hero wasn’t working out for him, so he went away, but unlike his Riddle persona, Voldemort would continue to be hunted, so he had to fake his death.
Just back from reading the new chapter, and assumed it without a second thought when I read that scene.
[Editing rest of comment to put it in rot13, because I don’t want to spoil chapter 84 for anyone who hasn’t read it. May be unnecessary, but I’m erring on the side of caution.]
Nyfb nffhzvat gung Gbz Evqqyr vf jub Nzryvn Obarf fhfcrpgf Dhveeryy gb or. Nyfb nffhzvat gung Gbz Evqqyr vf jub Nzryvn Obarf fhfcrpgf Dhveeryy gb or. Ohg nppbeqvat gb Obarf, Evqqyr qvfnccrnerq va 1973, jurernf gur Avtug bs Tbqevp’f Ubyybj jnf va 1981. Gung fhttrfgf gung “V… jrag bss gb qb fbzrguvat ryfr V sbhaq zber cyrnfnag” ersref gb gnxvat hc gur Qnex Ybeq tvt va rnearfg.
Bu Tbq. V whfg unq n greevslvat gubhtug. Jung vs ur qvfcbfrq bs gur Ibyqrzbeg crefban sbe ab bgure ernfba guna gung vg fgbccrq orvat sha?
Extremely unlikely. Dumbledore, Snape, McGonagall and Moody at a minimum know that Riddle = Voldemort; there would be no reason not to inform Amelia of this. Also, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore always knew Riddle = Voldemort- he wouldn’t be foolish enough to use his real name for his hero persona.
2b seems unlikely given Harry’s memory of the night matching the official line. Did Dumbledore do a FMC on baby Harry?
Also, remember that for someone with Horcruxes, one can de facto fake one’s own death by actually dying and waiting for the resurrection. There’s no particular need to assume that he survived that night in the traditional sense of the word.
But Harry’s memory didn’t include Voldemort casting Avada Kedavra on Harry. That memory is neutral WRT the “rebounded Avada Kedavra” hypothesis.
Also, no part of a rebuttal to your comment, but re-reading the scene, what’s with this line?:
legilimency of some sort? or simply dramatic license. I don’t remember any example of that particular action being pointed out that wasn’t leglimency.
In canon? In MoR eye-contact has happened a bunch of times since Harry got good enough to detect Legilimency, it’s just been the usual dramatic device.
Didn’t Moaning Myrtle recount something similar about her own death in canon, in which the glowing eyes were the Basilisk’s?
It’d be funny if the rock Dumbledore gives Harry were actually a piece of petrified: a) James (and Dumbledore knows) b) Voldemort (and he doesn’t) c) Harry himself (and the scenario for that would be ridiculous).
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “your father’s rock”, doesn’t it?
A FMC is described as completely envisioned and controlled by the caster, putting as much time into it as the memory covers; so Dumbledore in FMCing a baby Harry is choosing every detail of the scene. Given that… why would Dumbledore direct a scene like Harry recollects? It has several oddities which reduce its value as a ‘you killed my parents! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!’ memory.
This memory?
That’s the one. It certainly came from somewhere—IIRC, it’s got details he wasn’t told that have been confirmed, which means that it’s not an internally-generated false memory. So either it’s real, or it’s been implanted by someone familiar with the tale.
Or he imagined it and merely believed it to be a memory.
My memory may be in error on this point, but I did consider your hypothesis and explicitly reject it.
Perhaps one of the at-least-two people who downvoted me would like to tell me what these details are that make it impossible for the memory to have been internally generated.
So far, all I can come up with is this: on the basis of Voldemort’s mild reluctance to kill his mother in this memory, Harry deduced (via a rather tenuous chain of reasoning) that Dumbledore told Snape about the prophecy, and when he confronted McGonagall with this she behaved in a manner consistent with what he deduced. This doesn’t seem all that conclusive to me. What am I missing?
In fact, I’m pretty sure that events did not happen as Harry deduced them. In canon, Snape overheard the prophecy being given. This seems to match up with what Snape says in the chapter formerly known as 77:
Therefore I suggest that Dumbledore did not tell Snape about the prophecy. I’m not sure why or how McGonagall knows: possibly, in a departure from canon, she was conducting Trelawney’s interview instead of Dumbledore himself.
The beginning of Harry’s line of reasoning is that Voldemort was not terribly eager to kill Lily Potter. This seems likely to be true, but is also not indicative of anything. It’s a mildly strange thing to imagine, but we imagine strange things all the time.
Quirrell suggests that Harry can see Thestrals due to his memory of that night, which would suggest that it’s a true memory. But Harry seems to think that he saw the Thestrals because he has realized that Dementors are death, so that he has “seen death and comprehended it” in a more literal sense.
Yep:
Your suggestions are based on a faulty premise. Even in canon, Avada Kedavra has varying effects. Usually it causes an instant, silent death. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, it blows Dumbledore’s body over a railing and off the tower. In Godric’s Hollow, the rebounded Killing Curse exploded the upstairs of a house, and we never actually hear what happened to Voldemort’s body.
I don’t think we’re necessarily meant to suspect something amiss here; I think Eliezer just filled in a blank that was left open in the novels.
And I also don’t necessarily think a “love shield” is what’s involved in this story. In canon, Lily’s nonviolent sacrifice is what protected Harry. Eliezer presumably doesn’t believe that attempting to defend yourself makes your sacrifice any less noble, so it’s probably something different here. I think the likely story in MoR is that when Voldemort sarcastically said “I accept the bargain, yourself to die and the child to live”, he accidentally created a magically binding oath.
I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the “but how does anyone know that’s what happened?” problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.
Yes, but we saw the actual event in Humanism, part 1. We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse. The “small, small note of confusion” refers to what Harry realized much later: “Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children.” The confusion was about the reason Voldemort was so intent on killing Harry in the first place.
The reference to souls is simply because that’s what Dumbledore believes, not because of any plot. Yes, the Killing Curse behaved bizarrely, but we’re supposed to think “Why did it behave bizarrely?”, not “That must be a lie!”, especially given that it sometimes behaved bizarrely in canon.
If “Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story” and we don’t know what it is, that means he lied to us in Chapter 43.
Thank you for quoting the bit in chapter 46. I had forgotten it, and it is worth taking into account. But in context, I don’t think it shows what you think it does:
So prior to recovering that memory, Harry didn’t have nearly as much reason to think Voldemort had been afraid of him. In Ch. 3, for all Harry knew Voldemort was just the sort of person who would murder his enemies’ children given the opportunity, and he would have been largely correct to think that.
But it seems Harry’s inference that Voldemort meant to kill him may not be as safe as Harry assumes. It is equally consistent with everything Harry notices to think that Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry. Consider this part:
Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, “your death here will not save your child” would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, “Yourself to die, and the child to live” also reflects Voldemort’s true intentions.
At this point, it looks to me very much like Voldemort somehow decided killing baby Harry was not the right response to the prophecy. The prophecy looks like a key clue here; probably Voldemort wouldn’t have bothered with such a complicated plot as he appears to be pursuing without the prophecy. But what thought process led to that plot?
Chris Hallquist wrote: “Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, “your death here will not save your child” would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, “Yourself to die, and the child to live” also reflects Voldemort’s true intentions.”
That makes sense. Maybe all he wanted was to turn Harry into a horcrux, and suceeded. Since creating horcruxes requires killing someone, killing James Potter was a convenient horcrux-energy source, while killing Lily could be an extra, but unnecessary bonus.
You’re misremembering the chapter, that scene ends like this:
An experienced mage making an unforced error of that magnitude sounds an awful lot like the Idiot Ball to me.
“Held the Idiot Ball” does not mean “made a large mistake”. It means “behaved implausibly stupidly so as to cheaply advance the plot”. If Voldemort could never make significant mistakes then Harry could never defeat him.
I agree with you about what “Held the Idiot Ball” means.
I evidently disagree with you about how implausibly stupid it is for Voldemort to accidentally, for no apparent reason, magically bind himself to the infant Harry in the middle of a fight.
Or do you imagine this to be a thing that happens a lot when wizards fight, such that it happening in this case is plausible?
I don’t think it happens a lot, because I don’t think such ironic offers are made very often. The reason for Voldemort to say what he said was to be prideful and cruel, to make Lily feel how futile her sacrifice would be. In the heat of the moment, in his cruelty, he might not have thought of the magical significance of verbally accepting such a bargain. If indeed this theory is correct, his first fall was a result of his hubris, which fits his character well; and it also fits his character well for him to have learned from it and to not make the same mistake again in the future.
I’m not married to this theory. I’d put it at maybe 50% or 55% confidence? But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I’ve seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
Still… one of the very first lessons of Quirrel was about pretending to lose when that gained you more than fighting would.
Granted that Voldemort back then was seen to be winning. But he was winning a war we still don’t know his motivations for starting in the first place...
True, no explanation offered so far explains it convincingly, but I don’t see the idea that an Avada Kedavra bounced off a baby holding any water either.
2d) Something Voldemort didn’t expect. If Slytherin’s Monster transferred it’s secrets with a Dark Ritual, Salazar could have planned for Rule 12 and plotted to transfer secrets to future heirs. How would you identify a baby as a parselmouth?
Why would (how would) the Basilisk transfer its secrets with a Dark Ritual rather than just, you know, talking?
Also, in canon Harry wasn’t a Parselmouth until after that Halloween, and stopped being one when the Horcrux was destroyed.
Efficiency: speed & certainty. How many secrets would you be leaving behind before this incredibly baroque scheme was worth putting in place? How long would it take to communicate hundreds of ultra-advanced spells by one of the pre-eminent wizards of that golden age? How long can a student afford to be sneaking off to the Chamber?
We’ve seen legilimency used to read minds, but Order of the Phoenix also showed that it could be used to write to minds as well.
This seems to defeat the purpose somewhat. Isn’t the point of the Basilisk to ensure that only Parselmouths can access the secrets? Presumably legilimency is, if not impossible, at least difficult to use on a creature with the Gaze of Death, but if there were rituals to transfer information from its mind to yours, obtaining consent under duress seems a small enough obstacle.
I don’t follow. The Parseltongue requirements controls access to the Chamber and also communication with the Basilisk. What more is needed?
So you’re thinking a Dark Ritual that only works for Parselmouths? That might work, I guess.
Because a Dark Ritual could force a sacrifice that adds redundancy. Leave the Basilisk alone, mostly satisfied. Kill it and you are bound to transfer the knowledge to the next heir. Attempt to kill the heir and end up as a horcrux.
Again, Harry wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin when Voldemort was plotting to kill him, or attempting to kill him, or even afterwards. He was only ever a Horcrux of the Heir of Slytherin.